Author: Katrina Kaye

Fish

/ Katrina Kaye

Katrina Kaye

You beg.

Flip around
dry earth,
crunch up
stretch out.

Your eyes
swim
screams.

Large,
unblinking,
desperate to
understand.

I watch
sore and silent.
Knowing how
touch is
foil to freedom.

My darling,
please breach
the soil
of the solid
and return
to river bed.
And when you do,
take me with you.

We all ache
for rescue.
Easily confused by
the comfort of
trembling hands.

I too
am often
left to dry
on sun cracked rocks
skinned of scales
left to my bones.

You are not
the only one.

“Fish” is previously published in Rabbits for Luck (2016).

Home

/ Katrina Kaye / Leave a comment

Katrina Kaye

I look for you the way I always have.

Listen to your voice
sing incantations of my youth,

eager to hear news of your religion
in the cadence mucked in the back of throat.

They lost you in the backyard.
Misplaced your skull,
body deteriorated into earth.

I miss the way you wrap around me.
A feeling thick as a childhood home,
a place where awkward flows a little more free
and body moves in familiarity.

You spoke of it.

I’ve given up on a search for home.

I focus on climbing your tree.
Washing the smell of your cigarettes from my pillows.
Stretching upwards in long clean arcs
hoping you will feel the tops of my out-stretched fingers.

The imprint of you:
a hollow through the center of me,
only cured by the scent of you in my kitchen,
and the radiation of your body as it sits
three feet from mine.

I search for your bones in my garden,
mud caked and brittle,
hopeful there may be a piece of you there:

a shard I can wear on a string
proudly around my neck,

your souvenir on my chest,

and when people ask,
I’ll say it reminds me of home.

“Home” is previously published in The Fall of a Sparrow (2014).

The Past

/ Katrina Kaye

Katrina Kaye

The past is not fallen leaves;
it is dirt blanketing newly planted seeds.
It is a crack in the window
causing the afternoon sun
to rainbow across my wall
where September’s cold seeps in.

The past is the eye lash fallen on cheek,
a turned up carpet and door with broken deadbolt,
a watch stopped five minutes till three.

Sometimes the past rebounds.
It scratches at door, curls
around fires, lays in my bed.
The past does not haunt me,
I haunt it. A lingering scent,
a familiar hand brushed upon
the small of my back.

In the clarity of reminiscence
I see what I have been looking away from.
It is stark and it is clear.
I must let the past solidify,
shape it into perpetual bricks,
and mend broken windows
until my house can stand.

I am leaving pieces of myself behind,
waiting for others to catch up,
wondering what it is about me
that is so easy to pass by.

“The Past” is previously published in September (2014).